


Beauty from Ashes

by saisei



Series: IgNoct Week 2019 [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mpreg, Post-Canon, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 17:34:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20086081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saisei/pseuds/saisei
Summary: Noct and Ignis have one night together before Noct fulfills his destiny, and Ignis struggles to deal with the consequences. (IgNoct Week Day 5: Home)





	Beauty from Ashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aipenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aipenguin/gifts).

Had Noct been thinking clearly, Ignis knows he'd have realized that the privations after a decade of darkness most likely meant Ignis was not on birth control. Condoms of a sort were available in Lestallum but far from cheap, but Noct doesn't ask and Ignis has none to offer.

What they do have is a caravan to themselves, thanks to the generosity of their friends, and a wild, desperate need. Ignis has not seen Noct for so long, and the day of his return has been agonizing because he has not been able to _touch_. Every other person can see how age has changed Noct, but not him; all he perceives is a new roughness to Noct's voice, from disuse, no doubt. And it's not enough, not after he's been so patient for so long.

Had the bed been any further, they wouldn't have made it that far. Ignis kisses Noct and undresses him simultaneously, fingers slipping frantically on buttons, and Noct does the same. They're still half dressed when they tumble onto the sheets, but Ignis slides his shaking hands along every bit of Noct's bare skin that he can find, making a mental map. Neither of them are teenagers now; Noct has new scars, and he's filled out, put on muscle so his shoulders don't feel too large any more. Ignis can't quite picture his face, it's so different, and bearded as well. His waist is still trim, though, and his ass fills Ignis' hands perfectly once his trousers are finally kicked off.

Noct grabs for lube in the armiger, finds only hand cream, but that's good enough. Ignis fingers himself open as quickly as he can, and then Noct is in him, one long push that steals his breath, and hurts and burns, and feels like a gift, the most precious thing imaginable. All time stops when they're joined like this, moving together with a kind of reverence like it's their first time again, and then slowly remembering each other's preferences. Noct always bites and is fascinated by nipples, which had taken some getting used to; he's seen the scars along Ignis' left side, of course, but the tenderness he unleashes on the damaged nipple is harder to deal with than any pain. Ignis writhes and pleads with Noct to stop, but when Noct asks, "Really?" he shakes his head and says, "No."

He wants, and he wants, and he doesn't care about anything else. Not his dignity or how disheveled he must look, or how he leaves the caravan the next morning walking gingerly so as not to limp, like he's advertising how very well-fucked he is. How much Noct owns him.

They have that one perfect, precious night, and then they leave for the city.

When they return to Hammerhead, Noct lies still across the back seat, his head in Ignis' lap. Ignis strokes his dirty hair, marveling at the length all over again, his hand straying down time and again to check if Noct's breathing. He isn't. He doesn't.

Ignis washes Noct's hair and mends his royal raiment, and they bury him on a beautiful sunny morning.

Neither Gladio nor Prompto know what to say; Ignis is at a loss for words himself. Numb, perhaps. He'd expected to die in battle, not have to wake every morning and go about the business of setting the world to rights.

He lasts nearly five months working for the government, the slow work of resettlement and the restoration of services across the country. It exhausts him, makes him sick. In the end, Holly calls Cindy to come fetch him, and he's too worn down to protest. She drives him to Cape Caem with the radio in her truck tuned to the oldies station. Music popular when he'd been in high school, back in Insomnia, the songs he'd first kissed Noct to. He refuses to cry for Noct – one does not cry for the world's savior – so he pinches the bridge of his nose and breathes slowly. After a while he can taste the ocean on the air.

She stays a while. Agriculture is booming here along the coast, and she does good business getting tractors and other machinery in working order. A lot of people who want to move out of the city like how quiet and pretty Cape Caem is, while still being on the train line east and connected to Lestallum by cable cars. Ignis... drifts through his days. He helps build the mini-mall that goes up in front of the station building and begins reversing ten years of neglect on the cottage Cindy found for them. They're both damn pleased when he finally gets the plumbing working. The world seems much less post-apocalyptical when warm showers are available.

Still, her home is in Hammerhead, and even with Talcott helping out, she needs to be getting back.

"I sure am sorry, though," she tells him over dinner when her plans are finalized. "Hate for you to be rattling around this old place alone."

"Not... entirely," he says. "I'm expecting." He wouldn't say that he's in denial, precisely, but he tries his hardest not to think about it. The fact of the pregnancy occupies an uncomfortable space between the brutal knowledge of Noct's death and his absolute terror of childbirth and everything beyond. He should not, he thinks idly, have eaten. He's going to be ill again, he knows from unpleasant experience, and he gets up to go stand in front of the sink.

"I know," Cindy says. "It's obvious, no matter how much you cover up in Gladio's old shirts."

The idea that everyone around him has seen what he'd thought was secret fills him with acid shame, and he loses the fight to keep his dinner down. Cindy gets up and rubs his back, brisk and refreshingly unsympathetic, and then gives him a glass of water to sip at.

"You're gonna need to make some decisions," she says. "I know you're thinking how hard it is, but I swear to you, those friends of yours would be here for you _yesterday_ if you up and asked them."

"I don't want," Ignis starts, but that's not true; or not wholly. "I want – " His voice catches before he can say the name. He hasn't been able to say it, not once, not since they said farewell in the rain, in Insomnia.

Cindy's arms go around his waist, a hug that must look ridiculous. He's too tall. He's supposed to be stronger than this.

"This is a dick thing to say," Cindy says after a moment, "but pumpkin, I know you miss that boy of yours, but you don't got to do this alone. They get it, more than anyone."

Ignis knows, of course he does, but he still waits another month before finally, resentfully, sending a message to Gladio.

He suspects Cindy had been sending back reports on his condition and perhaps even arranged for someone in the neighborhood to do the same after she left. At any rate, Gladio isn't shocked or angry, and is more-or-less willing to follow Ignis' lead.

It is somewhat unfortunate that Ignis has no idea where he's going. He supposes he should start with the practical – where will the baby sleep? what will it eat? does he need to see a doctor? He writes down a list and then stares at the paper in his hands. If he can't manage something as simple as reading a list, he's going to fail Noct's child, and by extension Noct himself.

"Give me that," Gladio says, and the list vanishes. "Okay, all this stuff – " there's a sharp sound, like he flicked the paper with his fingernail "– I got covered. Iris sent down bags of baby clothes and diapers and things, and Prompto knows a guy who knows a guy who builds pedal-powered washing machines, so you're getting one of them. The hospital down here's pretty decent – a lot of salvage ships use the port, so they've got mostly-modern operating rooms. Drugs, too, probably. All that's left is making this place look like home."

Ignis frowns and lifts his head, looking around with pointless curiosity, wondering what Gladio sees.

"We're on it," Gladio says, and his chair slides back from the table, creaking as he stands. "Let's build some baby furniture. I have power tools."

"How fortunate I have electricity," Ignis says deadpan. "For a few hours a day, at least."

"Cindy left the details on the door." Gladio raps his knuckles on something, presumably her message. "We'll get the stuff made up, paint it, maybe paint your room. Pretty things up. The kid's going to sleep with you, right? At least for the first year or so."

"Perhaps." Ignis hasn't wanted to think about it. But once the wood's unloaded from the back of Gladio's car, something about the smell – fresh cut, clean, new – makes his heart feel like it's breaking all over again, and he has to tip his head back to keep tears from spilling over.

Their first two days together are like that, like he's utterly lost control over his emotions. He suspects it's because Gladio's not a stranger like Cindy was. Gladio is Noct's Shield, and his presence only highlights Noct's absence. On the third day Gladio tells him to man up and drags him in to see a midwife at the hospital. She says he can probably blame his melancholy on hormones as well, and that he's not likely to feel like himself for half a year or so.

He's felt a near-paralyzing guilt over ignoring and neglecting Noct's child for so long, but the midwife kicks Gladio out of the room and gives him a talking-to. She says no parent is perfect and trying to be so is a recipe for trouble.

"You do want the baby, right?" she asks, like she's ticking items off on a checklist, and Ignis curls into himself on the examination bed and nearly bawls like an infant himself.

Because he hadn't, he tells her, the confession ripped from him in clumsily-worded phrases; not for ages. He'd have traded away a hundred babies without blinking if it meant getting Noct back. He'd been angry. But he isn't now. He's starting to realize that this child is a gift, an opportunity, the last precious piece of Noct left in the world.

"No kid is perfect, either," she points out in warning, and moves on to asking about whether he plans to nurse.

Prompto comes down a few weeks later, and he seems impressed by how nice the cottage looks (they've limewashed all the walls, inside and out, and the floors apparently shine). He takes pictures and adds to the baby's growing collection of plush toys: a pair of fuzzy chocobo chicks, that go on top of the dresser with the moogle and the cactuar.

Ignis starts getting pains while they're all out in the yard fighting to hook the washing machine up, but he has no idea if they're insignificant false contractions or actual labor. How would he? He ignores them until much later in the day when they start to actually hurt, and then Prompto notices. They're all in the truck heading down to the hospital half an hour later, despite Ignis' insistence that there's no hurry.

Fifteen very unpleasant hours later, he's holding a kimono-wrapped baby and marveling at how incredibly tiny she is. Prompto takes pictures by the dozen, but Ignis tolerates it because Prompto also keeps up a soothing narrative: _she opened her eyes!... no wait, she closed them again, but now she's smacking her lips. She's got skinny little chocobo legs, look at her kicking. Keep her away from daggers, Igster. Whoops, now she's shaking her fist at me. Did the doctor say when she'll grow hair?_

Gladio apparently got woozy during the pushing part of labor and had to sit outside with his head between his knees, so hospital rumor has assumed he's the father. He tells Ignis to play along, that it'll make life easier in the long run. He's in and out of the hospital all day, running errands and washing diapers (Ignis was not prepared for how many one child could go through), but he appears at every feeding time. Ignis can tolerate the unpleasant, alien sensation of nursing much more easily when Gladio's deploying what he calls the triple massage whammy – head, feet, and shoulders.

This cozy domesticity doesn't lessen even when they're all back at the house, but it's incomplete. Ignis needs Noct to have a place there, so he speaks with Prompto and Gladio, who agree to help out and very politely ignore how his voice catches when he says his name. Prompto supplies pictures, and while it's frustrating to have framed photos on the shelves when he can't see them, Ignis enjoys the fancy that Noct can look out and see them from wherever he is. Gladio exchanges a flurry of texts with Iris and – with her impatient guidance – makes a contraption out of fishing line and lures that hangs over the crib.

"It looks pretty," Gladio says, sounding embarrassed while Prompto ribs him for being so arts-and-crafty. "There's no hooks. If it falls on her head she'll probably be fine."

Ignis follows the line and fingers each of the dangling lures. He never did learn to enjoy fishing as much as Noct did, but for his sake he learned. He can tell the lures apart by touch, knows what each one is for, and he remembers Noct's victorious smile when he landed a fish. He remembers... and some days the memories are like river rapids, threatening to knock him down and drag him under, but sometimes – increasingly – they're the calm ocean in the curve of a bay, shallow and warm, easy to wade in and out of. A good place, he thinks, to bring a child to play.

Gladio pulls Ignis out of his reverie and into a one-armed hug. "Now you owe it to Noct to finally give the kid a name."

Ignis hears a shutter snap. "Friendly reminder that fifty percent of all new babies are named Dawn," Prompto says, accompanied by the telltale sounds of him picking the baby up and settling her in his arms. "Maybe not that one."

"I was thinking of Celine," Ignis says slowly. The name seems to hang in the air, like smoke from an offering, and he feels a wrench of misgiving. Perhaps he ought to have made a joke instead of an announcement; perhaps she looks nothing like a Celine.

But then, in the still air, the lures ring out against each other like wind-tossed chimes. The sound is lovely and inexplicable, and Ignis smiles, lightened with joy.

Noct is home.

**Author's Note:**

> "From the Latin Caelīna, which is from Caelius, an old Roman family name thought to be from caelum (heaven)" (http://www.babynamewizard.com/baby-name/girl/celine)
> 
> Title from Celine Dion's Ashes.


End file.
